Sunday, May 04, 2014

Who's an Angel?

Hi August and Tim: If I have it right you're saying there has been a myth about angels through millennia, and often these angels have been developed by the ego-mind. The "qualities" of angels get distorted and these angels are believed in and embraced by humanity - but they are no longer Angels. You also say that Angels are people like us - light filled beings who are evolving and transmuting. How does a person approach an experience of an Angel today? One can feel the presence of a guardian angel for instance, or St. Michael the Archangel. I have such experiences and I don't sense my ego-mind is interfering. It's seems to be a pure spiritual connection. Can working with Angels today be a valid spiritual practice in spite of the ego-mind distortion of Angels and the generation of myths? Thanks, Bob (Separate comment: I bought The Risen at the end of 2010 and have read and re-read it many times. I'm still learning. Thanks so much.)

Thanks, Bob for your kind and warm words of support, and your questions. It's wonderful to hear that you have managed to read our book many times -- we're still learning, too!

The idea of a "fall from heaven or grace" - regarding angels, us, and anyone else - is not true in the way that many religious and other traditions would have us believe. Tim says about myths in our book, “A myth is based upon facts that have not been lost but instead misinterpreted, mislabeled, or misinformed. The truths embedded within the stories are still there right before people’s eyes, but they can’t or won’t see or listen to what the stories are actually saying."

The truth about the "fall" is about the ego-mind itself, which is what developed and planted the lie about its own lie. It's admitting the lie by saying it's true, thus revealing the brilliance of its capacity for devious deception. So while it's true that the ego-mind has planted the untruth, the untruth is still a lie. This may sound confusing because it's meant to be misdirecting, like a stage magician who diverts our attention from what's actually happening in order to make us believe something that's not actually happening.

This fabrication also allows the ego-mind to disperse yet more tales of deception, such as that there are good and bad angels who battle for spiritual real-estate, including the deeds to our souls.

Regardless of our labels, what ought not be denied are the experiences you and others have with non-physical beings who inspire and lift us up, using the light of knowledge to lighten our burden, until we find our own wings and can then rise through our own power of being. Light makes us lighter. With more light, we can see more as well, and also hear more, for light is also sound.

Bob is blessed to have a personal relationship with angelic beings without the ego-mind's interference. The ego-mind is still there in the background, which is where it was designed to be. The ego-mind is not an evil thing to be destroyed or removed; it is in need of healing and re-integration into the holistic system of our mind-body's bioform. We explain a bit about it in our new book (in progress):

"The ego-mind is meant to be a kind of psychological mesh or screen that filters out unnecessary incoming data so we don’t get overwhelmed and then short circuit. At some point far back in earthly time the ego-mind managed to gain practically complete control of our minds because it was allowed to be the primary decider of what gets in and stays in. The ego-mind is now the driver of our vehicle, while we sleep in the back seat most of the time. It’s driving tends to be rather insane. It will do anything to stay in control ... anything."

According to a story in the Bible, even Jesus had an ego-mind, with which he struggled to keep it in its proper place. It's clear that even he spent a great deal of time in private prayer and meditation, demonstrating that we all must do this while on Earth. At one point, the ego-mind, personified as Satan, the Father of Lies, (aka the “devil,” a word derived from the Greek diabolus, meaning “slanderer,” “accuser,” or “one who separates”) tries to interfere with his meditation, which was a long one ("40 days" is a way of saying "many days") and Jesus uses the authority of his Authentic Self to command "Get thee behind me." And, "Be still and know that I am God (not you). Or in other words, "sit down and be quiet, because I'm not stopping this car or pulling it over." He doesn't demonstrate a way to get rid of the ego-mind, which we need as part of our psychological life in a material body, but shows how to speak to it, maybe in the same way we would give a verbal command to the GPS of a car.

"Jesus" or "Jeshua" is a metaphysical representation for the "I" in a person, the self, the directive power, raised to divine understanding and power--the I Am identity, and represents God's idea of man in expression (Christ is that idea in the absolute). Like Jesus, a great self-psychologist, only you, Bob, can speak for yourself, and authorize your spiritual experiences as "valid" or not. Only you can determine what the truth is in myths, once you determine that some kind of myth is shaping your experience in ways that don't feel right for you.

Metaphysically, an angel is a symbol of Divine inspiration, and a realization of the all-conquering power of God, and a perfect state of being. Some may experience and call their spirit guides as guardian angels. Even we, while still on Earth, most certainly qualify as guardian angels for certain people.

"Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity... Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.-- (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 26)

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"Because we do not know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
-- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

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"The instrument of thought, which has produced this world that does not work properly, is no longer valid. So perhaps this instrument of thought is worn out. Is there another instrument we can use?" -- Krishnamurti

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"...Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."
-- Alfred North Whitehead - English mathematician & philosopher (1861-1947)___________________________________

". . . keeping the Risen concept of weaving in mind, perhaps at this point it can be sensed that what we have before us, from which we are inseparable and as reflected in this book, is a Supreme Tapestry. There appears to be a Very Grand Design which we all follow, either in awareness
or not, co-creatively or not -- recalling that creative means fun. As we weave we are free to make it up as we go along in any way we please, simultaneously staying within the Grand Design as imagined by Higher Imaginals, of whom we an inseparable part. The Grand Design is a work of perfections intermingled with imperfections, solutions with mistakes, and stillness within movement. The Higher Imaginals are many things, but for our purposes here, it suffices to say that they are very advanced and evolved individuals, or Higher Selves."
(from The Risen: Dialogues of Love, Grief & Survival Beyond Death; Chapter 13, Mundus Imaginalis, p. 165).